Dear Phil - the okra show

At the moment I am a little bit in love with okra (not to be confused with being an expert at cooking it (understatement)).

At Mekong Delta, they had okra growing in the garden. I had never seen an okra plant before.  I don't know what I expected it to look like, but not like this.  Maybe a vine along the ground like pumpkins?

Anyway, the real okra plant kind of reminds me of this:

Not that that's a bad thing.

Mekong Lodge does little cooking classes, and one of the things they showed us how to cook was stuffed okra. I haven't got any pictures of the stuffed okra part of the cooking class, because FIRST, they showed us how to make little spring rolls, and my photographer was off 'taste-testing' the spring rolls during the okra stuffing bit.

The stuffed okra were delicious and I have successfully recreated the dish at home since.  Basically, you make a little rectangular hole down the edge of the cleaned okra, rip the guts out and fill it with whatever you want - then shallow fry.  Mekong Lodge's recipe for the filling involved minced fish meat with spices. Mine involved minced pork meat with spices.  Tonight I'm going to try stuffing with rice and egg. I have lots of leftover Indian spiced rice with peas. Waste not, want not!

But I don't think okra is an easy vegetable to cook.  I can do this stuffed okra thing now that I've been shown it - but every time I've tried to cook it as part of a stir-fry or whatever I've ended up with a gooey gluey mess.  So if you have some tips maybe you could put them in the comments? I think perhaps I'm overcooking it.

Finally - the okra here are really big, in comparison with what we can get at home. They are about 10cm long - the ones I used to see at home were closer to 5cm long. It finally makes sense why they were ever called lady fingers.

No internet? Look out the window.

This is post is brought to you by the wifi at Noa Cafe in the Centec Tower.  Mr Martin, formerly known as RSB (Rock Star Boyfriend) very inconveniently forgot that he band practice tonight. So, as a Good Wife I had to lug two electric guitars to his office. Much to the amusement of the xe om drivers at the end of my street.  Lucky for me they have taken it on as their vocation in life to flag down taxis for me. And now I am having lunch by myself in the cafe, but I can't say I'm that upset about it because not only does Noa have truly great coffee, but it's a chance to squeeze out another one of those posts about the Mekong Delta trip.

Apart from the ubiquitous wily sparrows that seem to own every city in the world and a few mangy pigeons (nothing like the sleek musty birds that used to rub their scent off on my grandfather's hands) I almost never see a bird in Saigon.  Bats - yes.  By the hundred every evening at dusk, but birds not so much. At actually, at the Mekong Delta the birds were not so easy to spot, either. But we could definitely, always hear them.

New Zealand birds are famously stupid when it comes to hiding from potential predators, but getting out of sight and staying out of sight is something their distant Vietnamese relatives are definitely NOT bird-brained about by comparison. The Vietnamese have been too hungry too often to leave the feathered folk alone and the birdies know better than to hang about when someone's watching.  So obviously I didn't get any pictures, but I spent a lot of time gazing out the window saying things like "Big red bird! Big red bird!" and desperately trying to get glimpses of the big blue parrots I could hear cackling in a stand of trees on the next lot.

There was something else I didn't see in Mekong that is everywhere in Saigon - cars. After stepping off the bus on the main highway there was not a car to be seen - not even taxis. We had to get xe om to the tourist pier. It gave us a glimpse of what life in Vietnam was like before cars - and not that long ago, either.  Many of the roads were very narrow - wide enough for two bikes to pass one another but that's all. And they were often in surprising good condition - smooth surfaces that had obviously been swept free of stones and other things that could pierce a thin bicycle tyre.  The local still ride bicycles a lot, and motorbikes, of course. And the ferries (of which there are many) are all designed to carry bikes as well as people.

The sky looks a bit heavy and dark in that photo and it was a bit rainy that weekend.  We had a brilliant electrical storm on the second night, with loud cracks of thunder and fork lightning striking the island across the river. The lodge where we stayed at has a sort of eco-philosophy that translated to some vegetables and fruit growing in the garden on site, wooden chopsticks and no TV or internet (or fridge, which bothered me a bit because I wanted cold water all the time) in our room.  So our options were reading books, talking to each other or staring out the window.  Somehow, staring out the window was never boring for me - especially in the storm.

Our room at night.

Hoo hoos and the proper ranking of magical horses

The fruit in the Mekong Delta hangs heavily from the trees and fruit trees are everywhere.

 

Is this the world's biggest banana flower?

Durian ripening on the tree

Milk apples

 Baby rambutan

Of course water is the dominant feature of the landscape.

But when you are on land it feels as though the land must go on forever.  The vegetation is so thick that we could only see a few metres ahead at any time.

This is a papaya plantation.  The trees are all babies so we could see quite far at this point!

Local fruit was served to us at every meal.  I don't know who was keeping track of what we had ingested so far (big job) but somebody evidently was because we were never served the same thing twice in a row.

Somehow, everything tasted better than it does in Saigon. Mr Martin had been indifferent/negative towards jackfruit and rose apples in the past, but was now joyfully tucking into both. The jackfruit was sweet and soft and had a kind of  banana-ish flavour. Kind of like a those square chewy wrapped in paper lollies you used to get at the dairy.  I thought they were called "kegels", but then I looked up kegel lollies and the internet told me to stick a lollipop up my hoo hoo so that can't be right.  What are they called, kiwi people?

 Jackfruit tree gone mad on fruiting.

The rose apples we had were beautiful. Crisp and fragrant almost as if they had been dipped in nectar. We picked and ate them right off a tree that was growing in the garden of one of the two pagodas we visited.

Fresh rose apple with a bite out.

I think we felt almost giddy with pleasure at that point (if you discount the bike bum) as if we had been somehow transported and were no longer heavy-footed and earth-bound but gliding on a magical fruit-filled butterfly flowers plain.

 
There should have been unicorns.

Well, except that unicorns although pretty and magical etc are universally known to be big hoo hoos with fairly sociopathic personalities. Like koalas.  Cute on the outside, but inside they're totally saying: "I'm going to CUT YOU, motherf*%$er!"

So actually, just so you know, my magical horse of choice is the lever-powered flying horse from the Arabian Nights.  The only way that day would have been better is if there were flying Arabian Nights horses and a genie.

Mekong's next top model

He saw me coming.  His little eye watched me and he let me step closer, then closer still until finally I could get all of his implausibly long tail into the shot.

And then he was gone.